Bean Soup Recipe

Awhile back I posted about my family's favourite soup and was asked for the recipe. Here it is...


5-Bean Soup

3/4 cup of each: pinto, navy, lima, great northern beans and split peas
3 cubes veggie bouillon
3Tbsp. dried chives
1tsp. dried savory
1tsp. salt (only add this after the beans have cooked)
1/2tsp. cumin
1/2tsp. pepper
1 bay leaf
2-1/2 quarts water
14-1/2 ounces stewed tomatoes
*adding broken bits of dried kombu strips (about 3 strips) to when cooking the beans may help reduce the flatuence beans cause.


Sort and wash all beans. Soak overnight OR.... after washing beans put them in a large enough pot to completely cover with water and bring to boil; cook for 3-4 minutes. Remove from heat; cover and let stand for 1 hour. Drain and rinse beans. Return to pot and add spices and water. Bring to boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer 1-1/2 hours or until beans are tender, stirring occasionally. Add tomatoes and heat through.

**The method I use is to soak the beans overnight and then rinse them and add the water given in the recipe to cook them. I bring them to a good boil then lower the heat and add the seasonings (all except the salt, as adding this too early in the cooking will make the beans tough) to the beans. Simmer the beans for a good 1-1/2 hours or more (until beans are tender). The last step before serving is adding in the canned tomatoes (which I like to puree before adding to soup).
*** Don't forget to remove the bay leaf before serving.

Enjoy!

Enjoy Spring; and add some seaweed to your soup

These blue beauties are rewarding to see while doing my spring yard work clean-up ( I know, I know, I'm slow). Maybe I'm pacing myself?
Anyways, the temperatures outside are still chill enough to make it rewarding to come inside and warm up with a bowl of this tasty soup. Don't let all those beans scare you off. Just put some seaweed in your soup. Adding kombu to the soup does seem to help with the gas factor caused by the beans.
Of course, you could just spend the rest of the day outdoors if you don't want to add the seaweed to your soup ;o)

Grape start to your day...

I love grapes. My favourites are the blue coronation grapes. I love that tart/sweet taste that comes in every bite of these blue beauties. Each fall I eat many a pound of fresh grapes and then I start freezing as many pounds as I can crowd into my freezer. I am fortunate enough to live where they can grow and I appreciate having locally grown grapes through the winter months. Besides eating grapes on their own or adding them to fruit salad I like to bake with them. Here's one recipe I enjoy.

Grape Muffins**

1-1/2 cups orange juice (fresh or from concentrate)

1/3 cup oil (I use grape or olive or coconut)

1/3 cup pure maple syrup

Grated zest of one orange (organic!)

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup rolled oats (not quick oats)

1-1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. fine sea salt

1 cup fresh or (thawed) frozen coronation (seedless) grapes

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly oil a 12- cup muffin pan.
2. Put the orange juice, oil, syrup and orange zest into a medium bowl and whisk until well blended.
3. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a large bowl until combined.
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry using as few strokes as possible to avoid overmixing. Fold in the grapes.
5. Fill muffin cups about three quarters full with batter.
6. Bake for 20-25 minutes and then let the muffins cool for 5 minutes before removing them from the pan.

** This recipe is an adaptation from the Blueberry Orange Muffin recipe in John Robbins' book, May All Be Fed.

It's a hit!

I made a rather tasty stew for dinner today. My dear children tend to prefer plainer food, but now and again I rebel and make something that I know hubby and I will like and to heck with the consequences!

First I had to make seitan. Now, the first challenge is knowing how to pronounce it! Is it zyten, satan, say-tan? I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s a rather useful protein food made from wheat gluten that’s a good replacement for meat. I’m sure you can buy it ready-made, but it’s really easy to make.

You need wheat gluten, which is not the same as wheat flour or high-gluten flour. It’s JUST the gluten. I buy it from my favourite health food store. You *can* make it with ordinary flour, but it’s way more work. All you do is mix in some water until there’s no dry gluten visible and knead it a bit. It becomes VERY rubbery and weird-feeling.

Then you just cut it into little pieces (bear in mind it will double in size) and toss it into a large saucepan which is half full of boiling water, a couple of stock cubes, a splash of soy sauce or tamari, and a dash of VEGAN Worcestershire sauce**. (This last ingredient was an inspired addition today and it made for a very good result.)

Simmer for an hour. Drain it and use it as you would meat.

Today, I kept the “stock” and used it in the stew. I sauteed an onion, some very thinly sliced carrots (trying to get them in under the kids’ radar) and lots of garlic. Threw in a heaping spoonful of flour, then added the stock gradually to avoid lumps. Add the seitan and leave to simmer for as long as you like.

I found a few potatoes in the pantry, some broccoli and lettuce in the fridge, and that was our meal. I will definitely make the stew again - but double the quantity.

For dessert, I had been promising hubby I would make him a coconut cake for some time. Samantha’s book, Eat, Drink and be Vegan by Dreena Burton has a coconut cake recipe which I used for the cake part (leaving out the almond extract because I didn’t have any). However, the frosting in the book was made with silken tofu, vegan cream cheese and macadamia nut butter, among other things. R prefers to avoid soy as much as possible, and I didn’t have the second two ingredients, so I mixed Earth Balance Buttery Spread, some fine turbinado sugar, and some thick creamy coconut milk, and that made a yummy rich frosting to sandwich the two parts of the cake together. One warning....it needs to be kept chilled. Not long after I took this photo I found that the frosting had melted a little and had travelled southwards! I put it into the fridge until we were ready to eat. It was a hit! Everyone loved it.

**Ordinary Worcestershire sauce has anchovies in it, which are not vegan!

Go Cold Turkey this Thanksgiving

Just received one of PETA's newsletters and thought I'd slip in a link to this bit of info about the treatment of turkeys.

And here is a site which will give you lots of ideas for cruelty-free dishes to make this Thanksgiving.

No More Bull (edited Sept 28th)

I've just finished this book and being a vegan of course I agree with everything Howard Lyman says! However I do like reading this sort of book, because apart from confirming that I have made a good choice in being vegan, he has given me more ways of supporting a good argument should one arise.

He compares meat-eating with smoking. All the scientific evidence points to smoking being really bad for your health. Some people think that they should be allowed to treat their bodies as they wish and that their choices are not affecting others. With smoking, however, we have the second hand smoke problem - the rest of us don't want to breathe in all those carcinogens or have the stink of smoke in our hair and on our clothes when we go out in public. Most public buildings now ban smoking. I'd just like to add that smoking creates one hell of a litter problem. I was helping to weed around the building that my husband works in at the weekend, and the amount of cigarette butts tossed into the undergrowth was gross. Why do smokers think that cigarette butts are not litter - perhaps they think that they are biodegradable! Not! Factor in all the smoke breaks that employees take throughout the working day, and there's a lot of man-hours (person-hours?) going up in smoke. If by smoking you give yourself lung cancer or whatever, that is also causing pressure on the health-care system that could easily be avoided - more taxes for all.

Mr Lyman says that many meat-eaters would argue that it's up to them what they put into their bodies. However, here again, the scientific evidence is that a plant-based diet is way healthier. Meat (and here I include chicken and fish, people, anything with a face - oh, and dairy and eggs too) provides no worthwhile nutrition. We can get all the protein and carbs and fibre and vitamins and minerals we need from plant foods. Over and over again, it is the SAD (Standard American Diet) that has been proved to cause cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Mr Lyman also makes a good point about Alzheimer's being a result of our addiction to a meat-based diet (the symptoms being very similar to CJD, that lovely human version of Mad Cow disease).

So back to my point. Yes, people have a choice what they eat. However, there are good reasons for me to continue to publically speak out in support of a vegan diet and not just quietly get on with it. Raising animals intensively for meat is a waste of land. Growing plants to feed direct to people, instead of growing plants to feed to animals to feed to people, is a way better use of the land. Piles of stinking manure - now that's a reason to quit having feedlots. They have made large areas of the US unlivable and there's tonnes of methane polluting our air and piles of this shit are burning right now.

And I haven't even started on animal abuse, cruelty, slaughterhouses, fecal contamination of meat during "processing" (read - killing and mutilation, not necessarily in that order).

I think the world would be a much better place if the killing stopped - maybe if we stopped killing animals and ingesting their fear and sickness, we would all be pacifists who could then create a world without wars.

My hope is that meat-eating will, in the next few years, become something that is viewed like smoking - something that the minority do, despite the health warnings on the packets!

Tomatoes

Think that's just a basket of tomatoes? Not so. That, right there, is actually, oh, about fifty very good reasons to live where I live. You don't think home-grown, vine-ripened, grown in the hot sun 'til perfectly sweetened tomatoes are a compelling enough reason to base your decision on where to make your home? I do. And I think if you could taste these tomatoes you might very well agree with me.

Here is one (just one) of our many favourite ways to eat them. Toasted tomato and cheese buns, made with a sprinkle of Jerseyland Organics peppercorn Gouda. Yum.

Peaches and knitting

This peach streusel cake is delicious. I was given the recipe years ago by someone I met through La Leche League. She brought a plum streusel cake to a potluck and I have since found that it's great whatever fruit you put on it.

Here's the recipe for an 8 x 8 inch square pan - double it for a 9 x 13 inch

Batter:
quarter cup oil (not olive, something lightly flavoured)
half cup sweetener (maybe turbinado sugar or Sucanat or maple syrup, but please not regular sugar)
2 tablespoons soyflour mixed with quarter cup water (this is a vegan egg substitute)
one and a half cups flour (wholewheat or other whole grain - I used kamut )
2 teaspoons baking powder
half cup soymilk (or other kind of milk)
2 cups halved prune plums or sliced peaches or pitted cherries
Topping:
quarter cup sugar mixed with 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix batter ingredients together, pour into baking pan. You don't want your mixture too runny because it has to hold up the fruit. Top with fruit of your choice, sprinkle with the topping. Bake 35 - 45 minutes at 350 F.



This is what I made with the rest of the Bamboozle. Just enough was left over from making the Fetching fingerless mitts. Took me a couple of hours this afternoon while listening to Tick Tock, a Dean Koontz novel on tape.

Garden Update

The garden was busy while we were gone.
E is very happy with his watermelons.
Beans, beans and more beans.
A very industrious eggplant plant.

The squash decided that it wanted to outdo the beans and so is growing up the bean poles as fast as it can. Showoff!

The peach tree is loaded. Fresh peaches, peach smoothie, peach fruit freeze, peach platz, peach butter for winter waffles.....

As you can see by the pic of the peach butter my rock backsplash is still not done. I guess since it appears that Mike Holmes will not be showing up in all his tank-topped glory to finish our kitchen (another dream dashed, sniff, sniff), I will have to spend a little more time at home and get to it.

One of the pumpkins is almost ready.And of course zuchinni. Zuchinni soup, zuchinni Italian pie, zuchinni smoothie....just kidding.

And, since I made two of the zucchini pies last night I don't have to cook dinner tonight. Lovely!

Zucchini and Tomatoes...

Here's a shot of a pasta salad that I've been making fairly often since Heather has been sharing her zucchini abundance...

I usually grate the zucchini along with the carrots, but thought that by slicing them it would make it easier for you to spot them in this salad ;o) A very simple salad to make and you could easily add whatever veggies you prefer along with the chickpeas & pasta. The dressing is made from red wine vinegar and olive oil with rosemary, basil, oregano, dry mustard and pepper for seasoning. I also added some grated parmesan cheese, but again this is optional.
This yummy chocolate cake (my birthday cake, actually!) is made with pureed tomatoes along with whole wheat flour, coconut oil and maple syrup. The original recipe was from a children's book and I have substituted and changed ingredient amounts (as I tend to do once I'm familiar with a recipe). Anyways it's delicious and great way to use up excess tomatoes ;o)

Tofu.

I always think it strange when people tell me that they don't like the taste of tofu. I remember when I first starting eating vegetarian a little over 11 years ago and I was trying to figure out how to prepare tofu, the recipe book I had said to think of tofu as if it were flour, most people wouldn't want to eat flour straight out of the bag but you can sure make a variety of tasty things with flour. You can use flour to make all kinds of sweet or savoury things. Tofu is the same, and I think that most everyone can find ways that they will enjoy it. It isn't really meant to be enjoyed plain out of the package - although E likes it that way.

I forget if I mentioned this book already, it is called Simply in Season and I am really enjoying it. (the library bought it so you can borrow it from there) It has good, simple recipes all placed in order of the seasons, so if you have a ton of summer produce you can just look in the Summer section and choose a recipe. The recipes are interspersed with all kinds of interesting information on farming, organics, and the health of our earth. Last night I used one of the recipes (sort of) to marinade some extra-firm (no comments please N) tofu to make kebabs. E had asked me if we could have "food on a stick" because the last time I made kebabs we had company over and for convenience sake I had taken his food off the skewers and put it on a plate for him (thinking that I was being helpful and thinking ahead to save myself from doing it once I sat down to eat my dinner with our company). It turns out he had really been looking forward to eating the food right off the stick and was very disappointed.

W wanted to be the one to put all the things onto the skewers and arranged them quite nicely, I noticed that only half of them had onions on and those were "for you and Dad."

We also grilled what we are now calling "slabs of zucchini" as we are running out of creative ways to prepare the abundance that we have. We just sprinkle big slices of it with olive oil, thyme, garlic and salt and pepper. If anyone has any tried and true ways of zucchini preparation that they are willing to share I would love to hear them.Any finally, finally I got this pair of felted clogs done. These were meant to be a thank-you gift for our neighbour who very kindly took care of my sick cat while we went to Maui in January. Yes, January. Then I thought that I would get them done for her birthday in May....that's right, May. Anyhoo, they are done now and I felted them last night so that I could give them to her today. And, yes, I did forget them in the washing machine while they were felting. Of course I did, I always do, but they turned out nicely anyway.

Corn on the cob, corn salad, corn everything!!

This salad was part of our dinner tonight, it is based on a recipe that a friend gave me. ( I think it is pretty close to the original but I couldn't find the recipe -K and S I can hear your snorts of laughter at that "based on" ). My husband stopped on his way home and picked some corn and jalapenos from a friend's garden. I added two avocados, two tomatoes from the garden, and some onion to a jalapeno and about four cobs of lightly cooked corn. I made a dressing out of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, lime juice, fresh garlic, salt and pepper and then we topped it all off with a few shakes of Frank's hot sauce. Yum!!

Vegan Pal

Heard about a Vegan Pal swap today. You can go here to check it out. You have until the end of August to sign up. You don't have to be vegan to participate but you do have to follow the rules about sending vegan stuff.

When you find out who your Pal is, you send them a couple of balls of yarn (at least one of which has to be a Magic Ball) and some other goodies and you will receive back a mystery package from your Pal.

You need to sign up for Swap-Bot - it's all on that first page I linked to.

It'll be fun - go do it!

More gardening.

The boys and I spent most of the last four days at home or at the local beach. I got lots done in the garden this weekend. Here are some pics of flowers that I love. Here is a pic of just one of the watermelons that E is growing. I have never been able to grow these well but his seem to be doing just fine.

One night Samantha's family had dinner with us. This Disappearing Zucchini orzo seemed to go down well, Samantha ate quite a few bowl of it. ;-)

And what was my husband doing while we were at home working on the yard? He was hanging out here with these guys. So I ended up tearing out more grass on the side of the house...he really should know better than to leave me at home by myself with no one to try to talk me out of my "bright ideas". :-O Although I did restrain myself from ripping out our manky old bedroom carpet so I thought I did quite well really.

Pesto

"Oh good, we're having pesto." That's what W said as he ran into the kitchen for a drink of water yesterday afternoon. He loves pesto and I made our first batch of this year yesterday. I just use basil ( I always plant loads), walnuts (we have two walnut trees and are always looking for ways to use walnuts up), olive oil, fresh lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper. Those who want it add romano cheese. I froze the leftovers in little blobs so that I will have some to add to tomato, spinach and white bean soup, adding pesto makes the flavour of the soup incredible.

We also had some green beans that I stir fried with tomatoes, onions and garlic. At the last minute I decided to add some Patak's curry and they were delicious. Of course we also had some zucchini (are you starting to see a pattern?) and, since there was some pesto love going on, I put some pesto on the zucchini as well. Yum!

Pizza Mexicana!

Friday night is usually pizza night here and I decided to be a little more adventurous. (For anyone who thought you couldn't make pizza without meat and cheese, here are ten bowls that prove you wrong!)

There's chopped onion, sundried tomatoes, sliced black olives, corn, tomato sauce, sliced red bell pepper, canned pineapple, canned kidney beans, fresh tomatoes and grated VeganRella ("cheese" type product made from rice and oat milk).




The boys went for their usual toppings, but R and I had a rather tasty Italian/Mexican fusion gourmet pizza! The dough was made with organic kamut flour. Once the sauce, beans, corn, tomatoes, peppers and "cheese" were layered, I sprinkled it all with a hot mix of spices.

It was pretty good!

Roasted Zukes!

When reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I was looking forward to trying out some of the recipes from the book. This is the first one that I have tried, their grilled vegetable panini. It turned out well. I would suggest that if you are making it you may want to use a wider, somewhat flatter bread than I did, I just used a multigrain baguette. It is possible that on the narrower, more tippy bread that, after you get all the toppings put on just so, and are about to put it in the oven it might just tip over, spilling all the lovely toppings (so carefully arranged) onto the element in your oven. This might then make your house smell like burning onions and consequently set off your smoke alarm (aka, in our home, the pizza-is-done timer). If something like this were to happen then you might have to fish out the burning hot toppings so that they don't get stuck onto your element forever and damage it. All this is just conjecture of course...not saying that this is what happened to me or anything.I have been desperately waiting for some local corn, not allowing myself to be tempted by the U.S corn that has been showing up in our local stores. I am a huge corn fan. My mom likes to tell a story of a two year old me, hiding out beside the cooler on a family camping trip and gorging myself on all the cold, leftover corn. Fortunately I have grown up and that is not a problem anymore, there is simply never any leftover corn.

I also picked up some orzo today so that I can make the Disappearing Zucchini Orzo recipe too.